Adobe Customer Service – Yikes!

Adobe Customer Service appears to be an oxymoron. It would seem that Adobe named their popular Acrobat product based on the giant hoops people have to jump through to get any reasonable level of customer service.

Here is a great example of a large company who’s customer service fails badly because of lack of education and empowerment of their call centre staff, and a substandard process for dealing with technical issues:

My wife has an e-reader that she uses for library books. In order to access those books, she needs Adobe Acrobat and their online product “Adobe Editions.” There hadn’t been a problem until she got a new computer. When the new computer arrived, we loaded a new version of Acrobat XI on to it.

I had purchased it through my account, so by default I became the registered user. This is seemingly where the problem lies – because her library account, and her Adobe Editions is registered in her name. This end result is that she is now unable to get her books on to her e-reader.

It’s now been 5 phone calls to Adobe, with over three hours being bounced around from department to department. The last time she called, she was told that ‘we will escalate it’. This meant that she would now have to wait around for up to 24 hours to receive a call back from someone who, presumably, would know how to fix it.

The call, of course, never came. So now she will be making her 6th call to Adobe, and thee circle will begin again. It’s a classic case of a company that sees customer service as an inconvenience, not a necessity.

About The Author

Shaun Belding is a keynote speaker on customer service, and recognized as a leading global expert on customer service, customer experience and leadership. He is author of five books on customer service, leadership and workplace success. You can find more at www.shaunbelding.com
He leads The Belding Group of Companies, a global customer experience consultancy. Their training division, Belding Training, (www.beldingtraining.com) provides award-winning customer service training to companies around the world.